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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: Ni72ous on June 18, 2003, 06:35:36 PM
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Elbox recommends a voodoo 4, but i want to know if i can i use a voodoo 5?
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I heard that Voodoo 5 will work, but it has issues. It will only be detected as a 3 or 4 and may be unstable. Since I don't have a voodoo myself, I can't verify.
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What about a nvidia tnt 2 pro, i have a spare around somewhere, will that work in a Mediator?
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NitrousB wrote:
What about a nvidia tnt 2 pro, i have a spare around somewhere, will that work in a Mediator?
Well you can plug it in if it PCI but it wont have a driver available.
Voodoo 3 3000 16MB is what most people have as thats what hyperion did the warp3d drivers for.
You can pick em up on ebay for about £15.
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I have got a Voodoo4 PCI card that I got from Ebay, but now I only need a Mediator to fit it in. The fun thing about using a Voodoo4 with 32 Mb is that this memory on the card is also used as system memory and therefor works at turbospeed compared to the somewhat slower EDO memory modules that the system usually works with. At least, that's what I have read on the Elbox site ...
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Thank you for your answers.
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Effy wrote:
I have got a Voodoo4 PCI card that I got from Ebay, but now I only need a Mediator to fit it in. The fun thing about using a Voodoo4 with 32 Mb is that this memory on the card is also used as system memory and therefor works at turbospeed compared to the somewhat slower EDO memory modules that the system usually works with. At least, that's what I have read on the Elbox site ...
That's not quite true IIRC. It does indeed use the memory on the voodoo but only as buffering for transfers between other devices on the PCI bus.
This does indeed speed up certian transfers between cards considerably rather than going the 'long way round' (ie through system memory). Pretty clever trick all said :-)
However, transfers from the system to from the gfx card will still be limited by the rate at which the CPU can communicate through the Mediator (or G-Rex).
Some tests I got a bunch of users here to run a while ago showed that this is still under 10M/s for most Mediator systems and thats for quad longword aligned access (ie best case).
So the memory on the Voodoo isn't used for any program code or the like AFAIK...
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use voodoo3 , since v4 is buggy (WAY BUGGY) and v5 has issues with many games atm (like joyride,earth2140,wipeout and so on...)
v3 offers u best compability.
i also must add that even with v5 using v3 u get theese issues .
do like me, have 1 v3000 and 1 v5500 ... swap em around if u want something special to work.
anyway i must also add that both v4 and v5 is faster than v3 , but its not much but it does show in games like quake 1 and 2 and freespace etc. (heretic 2 wont show much diff tough...)
so be smart, get a v3...and a v5 if the price is right.
cheers
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Voodoo 3 3000 PCI hands down, no question, no matter what solution you upgrade with.